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SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs ThousandEyes comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (20th), Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (11th)
ThousandEyes
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (6th), Cloud Monitoring Software (14th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and ThousandEyes aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is designed for Server Monitoring and holds a mindshare of 2.5%, down 3.2% compared to last year.
ThousandEyes, on the other hand, focuses on Network Monitoring Software, holds 3.6% mindshare, down 4.3% since last year.
Server Monitoring
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Camargo - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides user-friendly API features and has straightforward deployment process
One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules. The misalignment of licensing terms can present commercial challenges when adding new modules or additional pollers. Additionally, the granularity of polling times for specific components could be enhanced to better meet individual customers' needs without impacting the entire polling pool.
Satyavrat Nirala - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers user monitoring and Internet insights and include customer journeys
It’s evolving; I feel it needs more holistic integration. It needs more improvement. It’s very good, but the integration can be slightly complicated on different platforms. I used it for a healthcare organization, and the integration was slightly challenging. In future releases, I would like to explore AI capabilities. AI would be more valuable because it works across different cloud and server systems. It looks into issue detection and insight modeling, so that is something I feel will be very helpful in the near future. More AI because of compliance and other challenges, not because of the product challenge. It’s about regulations, and we have HIPAA laws in the US and many different kinds of laws. Because of that, these specific elements and certain units don’t allow the tooling system to be fully utilized. We also support a certain segment of healthcare, which is the army healthcare segment, which is more government-controlled. There are certain restrictions in moving into the cloud. That’s where I thought those elements might need some more improvement. Also, looking into how we’ll be able to use more data visualization. It has it, but it doesn’t give you everything. If you look into the elements of use and so many other elements are there, but the UI/UX also has to be improved a bit, I feel. From a developer’s standpoint, it’s very easy, but from a consultant’s standpoint, there can be more enhancement, like one-click view and one-click report generation. Those things should be more seamless.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."
"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"The solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its scalability. It is a good tool for network admins."
"It's fairly easy to set up."
"The authentication overall - including to the VPN and LAN - is excellent."
"Overall, I would rate ThousandEyes nine out of ten."
"The solution's initial setup process was straightforward...In terms of ROI, the solution is worth the money."
"The most valuable feature of ThousandEyes is user-friendliness. It has been essential for us to have a solution that is easy to use."
"The most valuable features are integration and ease of use."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the path analyzer, which identifies the node causing the errors."
 

Cons

"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring."
"It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle."
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"I would like the product to offer more agility."
"The tool does not provide features for application-level monitoring."
"They only offer synthetic requests."
"More detailed documentation explaining the metrics and the testing mechanisms would be helpful."
"There is room for improvement in terms of customization and user-friendliness."
"ThousandEyes could improve the dashboards by adding more features."
"The solution's network and reporting could be improved."
"It would be nice if the solution covered other areas like server monitoring."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"In our company, we incur a yearly expense in our company for the licensing part. I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten since it is expensive."
"It is a quite expensive solution."
"The solution's pricing is cheap; I rate it a five out of ten."
"The solution costs several thousand dollars per year."
"The solution is cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
31%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. You can check...
What needs improvement with ThousandEyes?
ThousandEyes could improve by implementing a similar incident management system like BigPanda ( /products/bigpanda-reviews ) or ServiceNow ( /products/servicenow-reviews ). Having a dedicated incid...
 

Also Known As

SolarWinds SAM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Wayfair, GitHub, Craigslist, Comcast, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Box, HP, Zendesk, IO Data Centers, Good Technology, NNTCommunications, Proofpoint, Schneider, Crowdstrike, Avera, Pitney Bowes, InstartLogic, Shutterfly, Shutterstock, Condé Nast, Roche, Jive, Actelion, Brocade, Infor, Okta, JLL, DigitalOcean, Zuora, NetSuite, CloudFlare, One, DemonWare, Quantcast, Carbonite, CareerBuilder, Prosper, Oscar, Slack
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, ServiceNow, VMware and others in Server Monitoring. Updated: May 2025.
853,831 professionals have used our research since 2012.